A Summer in the Twenties Read online

  ‘Distinctions, distinctions. Now will you tell me about Miss Julyan?’

  ‘Only if you stop calling her that. Her name’s Judy or Miss Tarrant.’

  ‘Tom, I’m sitting here pouring tea for you out of this silver doodah and trying to behave as if we were just chatting about what happened at the Withernsee picnic, but it doesn’t mean that I’m not seething with bloody jealousy all through, just as if I were one of the women down the Holderness Road flailing with her broomhandle at the bitch who’s walked off with her man, It’s not reasonable in you to ask me to be all sweetness and light! Tell me about Miss Judy, then.’

  ‘She isn’t easy to explain. She keeps asking to meet you, you know, but at the same time she’s certain you’d think her an empty-headed idiot.’

  ‘And would I?’

  ‘Yes and no. I mean, she wouldn’t make head or tail of most of the things you and I usually talk about, but . . . well, she’d have understood everything we’ve talked about this afternoon. Really understood it, I mean, emotionally as well as intellectually.’

  ‘And that’s enough for you?’

  ‘Oh, there’s much more to her than that. She’s unusually pretty, for a start, and it’s no use pretending I don’t . . .’

  ‘Oh, I’ve seen her. You needn’t go into details. How do you think of her, Tom? Just now you started talking about me as if I were a bit of landscape—I’m not sure I fancied that—lot of fellows staring down at me before making up their minds whether to tramp to and fro all over me . . . Do you think of her that kind of way?’

  ‘That was only an image. I think of you as a very particular person—Kate Barnes.’

  ‘Glad to hear it. Give me an image for Miss Judy, then.’

  ‘Um . . . I don’t think I’ve got one . . . I often see one particular afternoon, only a couple of days after we met. She had a little sports car and we drove up into the foothills above the Bay of Biscay. We climbed a hill above a small town and watched the butterflies, and then there was a terrific sunset and we drove back to where we were staying . . . it doesn’t sound much . . . it was magical . . .’

  ‘Butterflies! That’s how I think of her, anyway. Up there in the sunlight, above the rest of us, not a care in the world except to be beautiful! Don’t you dare tell me that isn’t fair!’

  ‘Remember I’ve been brought up to like the creatures.’

  ‘That you have! Oh, don’t be spiteful, woman—you’ll regret it after . . . ’Scuse my asking, Tom, but have you ever been to bed with her?’

  ‘Yes.’

  They were so far out into candour that it did not cross his mind not to tell her the truth, or to regret that he had done so. Kate sighed and was silent. When she spoke her tone did not match her words.

  ‘Stainless Stephen. Another illusion gone.’

  ‘When we got back to the villa there was a telegram from my father asking me to come home. We were head over heels in love, though we’d hardly known each other three days.’

  ‘I bet it wasn’t you went creeping along to her room though.’

  ‘No. She came to mine.’

  ‘Thought so. Oh, Tom, if you knew the nights I’ve lain at Aunt Kate’s, thinking of you round at Aunt Minnie’s and knowing there was no road past the two of them to reach you! Some people have all the luck. It isn’t fair, really it isn’t. Why should she be let go gadding round the continent without even one aunt to keep an eye on her?’

  She managed to combine frustration and jealousy with comic self-mockery at herself for giving way to such things. He laughed, not out of embarrassment but because she wanted him to. Their mood was so close, their mental intimacy so perfect, that he felt as though he could see through the surface of the earth to the root-like network of meanings and impulses that flowered above that surface into speech. It was like dancing with Judy, except that it was two minds and not two bodies moving as one.

  Kate fell silent, staring at the tea-tray. Her stillness filled the room until only one faint source of sound was left, the almost inaudible burr of the flame beneath the kettle mixed with the still softer tingling noise of water on the edge of boiling. Tom’s thoughts would not order themselves, though he knew she was giving him time to think, to choose. As on the rockery at Brantingham, vistas of possible futures seemed to open and close, the scenery of the years heaving into place, strangely threatening in its sudden silent emergence and equally sudden vanishing. This room—dustless, cluttered, respectable—reeked of wasted lives and chances. A vision pranced before him of Judy in middle age, halfway to becoming an impossible old woman, still at times and in company brimming with frivolous energies, but at other times displaying like patches of a worsening disease, a hardness and sourness—a sense, unmitigated by intellect, of steadily being cheated by the years. Already the enjoyable feud with a neighbour or two would be widening to become unforgivable quarrels with old friends, until her only driving force would seem to be an erratic malice towards all she had once loved.

  He wiped the picture away. It was only a possibility, which care on his part might prevent. Still, a possibility it was, and no equivalent monster would form for Kate; though she too was capable of ferocious hatreds, her Furies would be creatures of the daylight, visible to Tom’s eyes also. He thought of Judy in the shadowed dark of the old coach at Rokesley. ‘I’ve got a witch mother.’ Pure fantasy, but still embodying a truth—and the witch-blood was in her own veins also. Probably it would never manifest itself, and at worst he would merely solve the riddle (as many other men must have done since Jane Austen first posed it) of how Mr. Bennett had ever come to marry Mrs. Bennett.

  But did he have to? Wasn’t it inherent in the rules when Judy had first explained them that either player could renege? Without that, where was the excitement? Had she not explicitly freed him from the hurried commitment at Hendaye? Had he not, at Rokesley, reasserted that freedom, overtly for her sake, covertly—almost shamefacedly—for his own? Suppose, purely as an intellectual proposition, he were free to choose . . . Whom . . . But the intellect itself distorted the proposition, declaring for Kate. He and she were of one kind: serious, active, set to confront the world as rational beings. Not that the physical attraction was not, in all conscience, almost intolerably strong, even in this stiflingly furnished room and though Kate had flashed barely a glance at him during the whole interview. She had offered him more than Judy was prepared to, not just herself, body and mind, but her own past and future; all she had worked for, sacrificed herself to, she would betray for him. Whereas Judy had set limits. ‘I do love you, but not if it means chicken-farming.’

  Kate didn’t even ask for marriage. She expected no commitment. She was offering Judy’s game made real.

  If he were free . . .

  But the choice did not lie in the intellect. No argument could disprove his love for Judy. Time might, but the choice confronted him now, in this room, and his love and longing for her remained facts as definite as his love and admiration for Kate. They had little more in common than youth and an upbringing that allowed them to understand, without thought, what Kate would call the mechanics of silver kettles. From what Tom had seen in Hull, heard from Bertie, felt unconsciously at Sillerby, he guessed that another generation would make such knowledge valueless. If he were to marry Judy, he would stay the same man; if he were to marry Kate—the other alternative seemed unreal to him; somehow he knew himself to be the marrying kind, naturally monogamous—if he were to marry Kate, he must change. And of course he was not free, game or no game. Chance might have loosed him from the burden of Sillerby and the duty to marry money to keep it standing, but another ancient edifice, spectral but just as compelling, still dictated his destiny. Honour, Father was fond of saying, was the devil’s virtue . . .

  Kate broke the silence with a sigh.

  ‘You know,’ she said, ‘I’ve been trying to eat my cake and have it too. I’m asking you to give your Judy the chuck because I want you for myself, but one of the reasons I want you is becaus
e you’re not the sort to do a thing like that.’

  ‘You’ve been reading my thoughts.’

  ‘Have I now?’

  She rose, yawned, stretched and sat down beside him, sliding her arm round his shoulders.

  ‘It’s all right,’ she said. ‘I’m not going to try and come between you and your girl—I’m just going to wish you well with a good old working-class kiss. Come on, Tom. What was that you were saying about words not being enough? Show me you’re not an enemy then.’

  She was very gentle, neither devouring nor submissive. Her body, which he had unconsciously imagined to be sinewy and taut with its inner energies, was so soft that it seemed almost to be a liquid held in shape by her dark crackling dress. The energies transformed themselves to a generous glow. It was as natural to kiss her, to move against her, to respond to the motions of her mouth with his, as it is for a child to bury its face in the fur of a cat. When she leaned away from him, he leaned with her, as if in the movements of a dance. But there was an invisible frontier, which each recognised without a signal from the other. He straightened and she slithered away, laughing, to the far end of the sofa. She began to pat her impossible hair, as though any outward event could either arrange or disarrange it.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said, laughing with her.

  ‘I don’t get enough of that,’ she said. ‘With this fellow I was telling you about, there’s always the complication of motive. Nothing’s simple and straightforward. Talk about alienation of the worker! I think I’ll find some young man down in the docks to set my cap at. Why, I might give Harry Struther what he wants for a bit.’

  ‘But he’s married!’

  ‘Not married enough to my mind. I’m glad you enjoyed that, Tom. You haven’t had all that practice, have you?’

  ‘Not a lot.’

  ‘You’ll be all right though, with your Judy. She’s got that look—you can see it in the eyelids, here . . . Tell me, are they all like that, up among the butterflies?’

  ‘Butterflies don’t have eyelids.’

  ‘I’m not talking about that! The look, it’s nothing to do with class—you see it down among the back-to-backs just as much. Not that there aren’t plenty of frigid bitches there too—and the way some of the men go mad over them. No, Tom, it’s fellows like you, kids who saw their Mums just an hour after tea if they were good, all they knew about women was a Nanny shaped like a bolster, then off to boarding school with a pack of other boys, swapping mucky little guesses about what happens under a skirt . . . why it’s a wonder they can breed at all!’

  ‘My Nanny was over sixty. She had a black moustache.’

  ‘And still you knew what to do when Miss Judy . . .’

  ‘Luckily I didn’t have time to get steamed up about it.’

  ‘I’m beginning to think she’s cleverer than she looks.’

  ‘I hadn’t thought of that.’

  She smiled, smugly knowing, and fell silent, apparently hypnotised by the glimmers of silver and brass on the tea-tray. With a sudden decisive shrug she leaned forward and slipped the little silver dome over the lamp of the kettle, extinguishing the flame. The vague, placid hum of simmering water died. With it died the complete openness and mutual understanding of the last half hour. The normal unknowability of other people, even of close friends, returned.

  ‘Aren’t you going to ask me his name?’ she said.

  ‘Ricardo.’

  ‘Who told . . . But his real name, don’t you want to know that?’

  ‘Yes, but I’d rather it wasn’t you who told me.’

  ‘I would.’

  ‘Then we would both be ashamed.’

  She looked at him sidelong, pouting a little, uncertain. He guessed that she had asked for the meeting in order to make this betrayal. In a sense it was to have been the climax of the whole interview.

  ‘You said you wanted something from me?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Give up the Party?’

  ‘No, nothing like that. I mean, if you decided to give it up because you really wanted to, or thought you ought to, I can’t pretend I shouldn’t be glad. But I’d hate you to do it for the mere sake of making an emotional sacrifice.’

  ‘Nothing very mere about it. You aren’t going to ask me to get the strike called off? I can’t do that—I’m not in charge. No one is, in a thing like this. It’s in charge of itself. It’s got its own rules.’

  ‘I know. But people can make those rules work in their favour. Tell me something about that—did you know what was going to happen on Marfleet Strand?’

  ‘I knew there might be trouble, but I’d no idea what. You walked there with me, remember? D’you think if I’d known . . .’

  ‘No. Who gave you the document you produced?’

  ‘He did.’

  ‘And after, when you realised how he’d been using you and the others?’

  ‘We had a flaming row. At least I tried to have a flaming row but he wouldn’t catch. He just kept saying he was acting on orders.’

  ‘From Moscow?’

  ‘Eventually. I can’t do anything about that either, Tom.’

  ‘No, of course not.’

  ‘That all you want to know?’

  She spoke briskly, as if to disguise even from herself the sense of emptiness and waste.

  ‘It’s not all I want. I need your help. You see I want to do something a bit like what your friend arranged on Marfleet Strand, but on the other side. Nothing violent, I hope, but just making what you call the rules of the strike work in the opposite direction for once. I’ve been thinking about it since the fire. I’ve become obsessed—rationally obsessed, if you see what I mean—with the notion that something’s got to happen, some event take place, before other things can change. It nearly happened at the fire itself, I felt, and if it had it would have been a disaster. Your friend Ricardo is waiting for the next chance for something like that. I feel it’s up to me to make something different happen, something that will loose the jam, but in the opposite direction.’

  ‘Just you alone?’

  ‘That wouldn’t do any good. The men have got to be part of it. That’s why I need your help.’

  She nodded but without assent, a mere indication that he should continue. Her eyes were unreadable.

  ‘As far as I can make out,’ he insisted, ‘it’s Party dogma that a situation like this should be exploited to the utmost. If an immediate gain can’t be won for the workers, then things must be arranged so that the dispute becomes still more serious, feelings still more bitter, until the workers rally round the Party because it’s the only place for them to go.’

  ‘That’s one of the lines,’ she said drily.

  ‘It seems to me utterly immoral.’

  She looked steadily at him, waiting. He had refused to let her make one betrayal—why should he now expect her to make this only slightly different one? At least it was clear to him that not to have trusted her would be worse than having trusted her and been himself betrayed.

  ‘What I want to do sounds quite mad and futile,’ he said. ‘Only if I bring it off I think it might do the trick. You know there are eight trucks of stores up at the Mills near Selby, waiting to be distributed when the strike ends? I want to borrow a locomotive and bring them down to the docks and distribute them now.’

  ‘Tom!’

  ‘You mustn’t laugh. I’m serious.’

  ‘I can see you are. But . . . oh, Tom!’

  ‘It’s meant to be a lark, I suppose. That’s the point. Cheer everybody up.’

  ‘It certainly would do that. Why, quite minor bits of mischief they pulled off in the General Strike, they’re still telling each other. Can you really do it, Tom?’

  ‘I think so. I shall have to go and look at a few things tomorrow—see exactly where the trucks are lying and so on. The junction at Eastrington may be a problem. But otherwise it’s much easier than it sounds. With the docks on strike Mr. Tarrant is perfectly likely to be going for one of his night runs—he t
ook me for one last week so I know the form. All I’ve got to do is make one telephone call using his voice—it’s very easy to copy—borrow his engine, run it up to Selby, hitch onto the trucks, bring them back down to Eastrington—some of the signalmen may be a bit startled to see me going through with a load, but I’ll be past before they can do much. At Eastrington I shall have to get them to let mc switch onto the Wold Line—that’s really the chief worry—and the Wold Line’s not manned all night because of the strike. If all goes well I should be able to bring the trucks round to that bit of waste ground behind Belmont Street and leave them there for the men to unload while I get the engine back to its shed before the milk train.’

  ‘Tom, they’ll send you to prison!’

  ‘I don’t think so. With a bit of luck there’s no reason why anyone should know I was involved. The Tarrants are away this week, staying with friends on the Tweed. Of course they’ll learn it was Mr. Tarrant’s engine, but if I wear the right clothes and speak a bit rough to the chap at Eastrington—he’s the only one I’ll have actually to talk to—I can make it look as if it was something the men brought off by themselves. And as a matter of fact if they do find out I’ll probably only have to pay for the cost of the stores. I think I know somebody I could borrow the money from.’

  (Strange destiny for a driblet of the Heusen millions. Would the old shoemaker churn in his far-off grave?)

  ‘This very week?’ she said.

  ‘Thursday night, if all goes well. Before anything worse happens. Are you on, Kate? Do you think it’s worth a try?’